Moral credentials, internal motivation and perception of threat: A study on prejudice against North-African immigrants in France

The present research studied the effect of internal motivation (Plant & Devine, 1998) and perception of threat in a specific context of moral credentialing (Monin & Miller, 2001) on the expression of prejudice against North-African immigrants in France. Moral credentialing, by definition, distinguishes between a task 1, in which individuals express non-discriminatory behavior, and a subsequent task 2 in which they might or not discriminate. As expected following the work of Monin and Miller (2001), results showed that individuals, who allocated moral credentials to themselves after a non-discriminatory behavior in the first task, discriminated more in a second task than the control group when both internal motivation and perception of threat were low. The second aim was to look at the underlying mechanism that can explain the discriminatory behavior expressed by individuals in the second task. One way of doing so is by measuring the amount of guilt individuals feel after this second choice. Monin and Miller (2001) suggest that there is a loosening of the system of control after the first choice that allows individuals to discriminate more without realizing their action. In this case then, individual should feel less guilt. However, it is possible to speculate that in some circumstances individuals are aware that they have produced a discriminatory second choice. Here instead, one would expect them to feel more guilt. This distinction was discussed in terms of the effect of internal motivation and perception of threat on feelings of guilt.